All those moments...

As soon as I walked in the warm, sticky diner from the snowy outside, my glasses fogged, obscuring my sight. With a few blinks of the eye, I was able to distinguish the blurry shapes of a bar and the man sitting at it. I couldn’t make out a face, although I knew the man had turned around upon my entry and was staring at me. Not knowing if he was someone I knew, I smiled and said hi. His fuzzy outline nodded at me and the man held his stare for long enough that I was able to wipe off my glasses with my scarf and return them to my face to see the face that was smiling back.

In an instant, my smile froze and I purposefully glanced away. I shrunk into my City Self. One thing in the world was quite certain--I was not going to let this man ask me for money.

"Hey." I said to Jessica, the waitress. Looking over at the man as he resumed slurping at his coffee, "I'm just going to get something to go."

As she handed me a menu the man pushed away his plate.

"I can't finish the fries. But it was real good,” he quietly told the waitress.

"Yeah? You ate a lot though. You're probably going to float away," Jessica laughed, whisking his plate away and replacing his coffee with another steaming cup.

I skimmed the diner-fare menu, even though I already knew what I was going to order - a grilled cheese on rye and a side salad with vinaigrette. I had been spending too much money on eating out, so I decided on it because was one of the more inexpensive items on the menu yet it was still fairly sensible.

I put in my order and stepped toward the cash register to take care of my bill. As I was paying, I saw the man look down at the duffle bag that was sitting on the stool beside him. Its seams were bulging with what looked like the contents of his everyday life. He kicked his bag further under the seat

"My wife isn't home to cook me dinner, so I ate here," he said loudly, looking up, but to no one in particular. He scanned the room to see if anyone was listening. I darted my eyes down to the floor and fixed my sight on my snow boots, damp with melting snow.

It was the most touching lie I had ever heard. In that moment, the enormous ice fortress that I had constructed around me over my five years in the city instantly melted, leaving me in a hot puddle of guilt. Why did I earlier withdraw my smile?

I trust my instincts, those tiny warning signals that seem to pop up out of nowhere. I don't even care to reduce those moments to “vibes”. I’ll leave that word to the hippies. I think there's something else there that is more concrete. A true fact, wafting in the air. A tiny trace of fact. A distinct signal, clouded by emotion and experience, telling us something very specific is amiss.

But in this case, my instinct wasn't to protect myself from being fleeced. Strangely enough, my instinct was to fleece myself. Once I cleared the fog from my glasses, I saw that the man in front of me was dressed in a hodgepodge of flannel and denim. He had long hair with a long graying beard and a semi-toothless smile. I didn't see details, but I was sure he had dirt under his nails and holes in his shoes. And the duffle bag beside him was graying and dirty, as if he had been dragging it behind him in the alleyway on the way to abandoned house where he sleeps.

I really didn't want to uncover some clue that might tell me from where he scrounged up his clothes or how he lost his tooth. I didn't want to be able to see the dirt under his nails or the holes in his shoes. And even though I knew at the bottom of my being that this man was homeless, I didn't want to consider how cold he might be or where he might sleep or what variety of mental disease he might have. I didn't want to think of all the single moments of bum luck or bad choices that amounted to, in that exact moment, a belly full of a $4.00 plate of ham sandwich and French fries, some warmth and comfort on that padded stool, and the company of a waitress who had enough heart to treat him like a human being on a bitterly cold Thursday, the final day of the worst snow storm Chicago had seen in years.

As a distorted offertory response, I was compelled to stay and wait for my sandwich, rather than come back for it like I'd earlier planned. I wanted to sit down by the man and buy him coffee and talk with him. I wanted to take back my fake smile from earlier. I wanted to tell the man I was sorry.

But instead, I tipped the waitress $2 and left the diner.